The opening movement is entitled Inferno and depicts Dante and Virgil's passage through the nine Circles of Hell. The structure is essentially sonata form, but it is punctuated by a number of episodes representing some of the salient incidents of the Inferno. The longest and most elaborate of these — the Francesca da Rimini episode from Canto 5 — lends the movement something of the structure of a triptych.
The music is chromatic and tonally ambiguous; although the movement is essentially in D minor, this is often negated by G♯, which is as far as one can get from D. There are relatively few authentic cadences or key signatures to help resolve the tonal ambiguity. The harmony is based on sequences of diminished sevenths, which are often not resolved.
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Famous quotes containing the word inferno:
“New York ... is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.”
—Roland Barthes (1915–1980)
“It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse. It is obviously much easier to find inhabitants for an inferno or even a purgatorio.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)